Whenever a competitor to WeWork, the erstwhile big dog of co-working, gets a chance to stick the knife into their rival’s ribs, they don’t pass it up.
Last year, for example, the San Francisco coworking startup Codi earned itself a cease and desist letter and a lot of free publicity when it camped outside of WeWork locations in San Francisco and New York holding signs reading, “Office Shutting Down? WeWon’t”.
This happened shortly after news reports questioned WeWork’s ability to continue operating.
WeWork has since entered bankruptcy and has been doing whatever it can to shed leases it considers unprofitable. And apparently, there were quite a few of them.
Now, according to Bloomberg, coworking rival Industrious has taken over WeWork’s former Manhattan HQ space. The move may not have been motivated by spite, but it sure seems like it.
Corporate Survivor?
Yet despite all the humiliations it has endured, not the least being Jared Leto’s Israeli accent on WeCrashed, WeWork keeps living to fight another day. How it has done so is an interesting question.
I am a former WeWork customer. And I always enjoyed the product. It was really the profligacy and grandiosity of its management (led by the infamous Adam Neumann) that did in WeWork. Just re-read Scott Galloway’s infamous We WTF takedown. Do it just for fun, if nothing else.
Yet, WeWork is proving to be almost as hard to kill as Steven Segal. As evidence of the company’s cockroach-level survivability, today the company announced it has emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy (which it entered back in November) and reshuffled its leadership.
The company has installed a new board and named veteran commercial real estate executive John Santora as its new CEO. He will replace David Tolley, whose departure was previously announced.
So if the bomb ever drops, will the best place to hide be in a WeWork?
